NSPCA warns City of Cape Town about sanctioned, “inhumane” treatment of animals

Mahatma Gandhi once said that “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

Residents walk through shacks in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township in this picture taken July 9, 2012.

Some genius working for the city came up with the hair brain idea to capture and drown rats as part of the City of Cape Town’s R750 000 rodent control strategy – if you could even call it a strategy –.

Now, while they are rats and a pest, they are living animals and as such there are laws that prevent us from treating them in an inhumane way; something the city obviously chose to overlook as it rolled out this sanctioned animal abuse campaign.

The idea behind the ‘strategy’ – which was rolled out in Khayelitsha a month ago – is to distribute cages to catch the rats with, throughout the community. Once caught, the rats would then be drowned.

The NSPCA’s Alwyn Marais has issued a warning to the City of Cape Town in which he says that drowning the rodents is inhumane and in contravention of the Animal Protection Act.

According to IOL, Marais said if the city failed to retrieve the cages used to drown rats, both the “perpetrator and the city would face charges of cruelty to animals”.

Eager to get their slaughter on, the City has already distributed 358 cages in Khayelitsha, but hasn’t been able to get a single one back.

The city’s health councillor Siyabulela Mamkeli said folks didn’t want to give the cages back as this method of eradicating rats is much more effective than using block-baiting.

He added that it had ‘reduced the risk of exposure to poison in densely populated areas and had created work opportunities through the Expanded Public Works Programme’.

Now, while previous methods of poisoning the rats have at times caused complications when kids ate the poison, abusing the animals in this way makes no human sense, surely we’re not barbarians?

The city earlier told the Cape Argus that drowning the rats ‘had been deemed the most humane and practical way of exterminating the rats’.

But Marais said he could not believe the city had not checked whether the project had been legal when it was launched.